


Collapse The Box

by pagination



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Child Death, Depression, Graffiti, Mention of Child Abuse, Pen Pals, Possibly Pre-Slash, kink_meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 08:28:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1029517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pagination/pseuds/pagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When John Blake scribbles a quotation on a brick wall one winter morning, he's just trying to win a little luck. </p><p>What he doesn't expect to get is a reply.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collapse The Box

**Author's Note:**

> Done for [kink_meme](http://tdkr-kink.livejournal.com/3076.html?thread=3101444), then revisited and beta-ed by the extraordinarily and marvelous [Sibilant](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibilant/pseuds/Sibilant).

_“Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.” —Banksy._

 

* * *

 

It starts like this.

The building is sullen, hungry, and treacherous, and when John runs his fingers across a crumbling corner, it growls at him low, just beyond the edge of hearing. But the sight lines are good from the top floor, and there’s a safe run across the rooftops to four different vantage points, all obscured. Braddox needs someplace to rest before the fever burns him up. Montoya hasn’t said a word in almost four hours, which worries John even more than the blood that’s soaking through the bandage around her leg. 

They’ve almost been caught by three of Bane’s patrols in the last two hours. It’s no decision at all, really.

“Here,” John tells them, slicing the ball of his thumb on broken glass. He smears the blood across the wall, tasting iron on his tongue and the tickle of something in him unraveling to cling to stone. 

Braddox stumbles through the door that opens to John’s shove, unquestioning. Montoya, whose eyes are sharper, gives John a look.

“You’d think you’d have left enough blood around the city,” she says, her voice creaky from disuse.

“How about that,” John says. He sucks on his thumb while the building mutters crankily, appeased for the moment. “I’ll keep the first watch. Get some rest.”

Montoya doesn’t argue.

John climbs the building across the street while the other two sleep, stationing himself on a fire escape that’s prickly with rust. Pigeons court him, their chests puffed out in desperate display as they strut in diminishing circles. He collects a silver-edged feather and tucks it in his jacket for later. The birds fly away, offended.

He keeps the first watch, then the second. And then, because of the three of them he’s the only one whose skin is whole, the third. At midnight, a group of Bane’s men drive down the street, disciplined and silent. They pass the building by, oblivious. When he comes down at first light to wake his companions, Braddox’s fever has broken and Montoya has not only rebandaged her leg, she’s located a closet filled with some past hoarder’s cans of tuna fish and fruit. 

“There was a bookshelf,” she says, looking down at the debris that covers the floor. “It fell down.” She falls silent, thoughtful.

“And there was a door behind it,” John prompts.

She looks at him. “Imagine that,” she says. Impossible to tell if she’s being sarcastic.

“Imagine,” he echoes politely, and, “I’ll be fucked if I’m going to carry all that.”

“Wouldn’t want you to bleed all over everything,” she says, peeling open a can so Braddox can hand-feed himself with shaking fingers. “We’ll put what we can in the packs and hide the rest. Gordon’ll send someone back for it later.”

John goes outside into the grey morning and fishes his chalk out of his pocket. The bat sign he scrapes across the lintel is a mixture of chalk, blood, and spit. The building shivers with dissatisfaction, its mood black. The bat alone isn’t enough. He eyes the patch of red brick beside the window and considers for a long moment before setting to work.

“What’re you doing?” Montoya asks, stepping out with Braddox a wan ghost at her side. She regards John’s efforts with curiosity, then amusement. He’s never quite sure what she sees with those eyes of hers.

_‘Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.’_

“I just thought….” he says lamely.

She opens her hand, palm up in command. He drops the remnants of his chalk into it, and she changes the period at the end of his graffiti into the familiar mirrored sickle of the Bat. Its wings spread wide, brazen.

“Hallmark greeting,” she says, tossing the chalk back, “Gotham style.”

The building purrs as they walk away.

 

* * *

 

The first rule is not to talk about it.

There are jokes to be made there from an earlier generation, but Fight Club is too recursive for orphans. Popular culture is only popular when there isn’t something darker and more dangerous absorbing one’s attention. There’s Bloody Mary in the sewer who likes to suck on eyeballs; there are the angels who live by the train tracks and eat little boys. There are the charms of dribs and drabs to hide from cops and dealers; there are the gifts to bribe a building into giving safe shelter and an early warning. Survival’s a thing of chance and sleight of hand, when you’re young and alone on Gotham’s streets. The tricks to it are hand-me-down, taught by older kids to younger before they forget reality. 

And then there’s adulthood, when the magic seeps away, and the thrill of the fantastic becomes the apathy of the mundane. _When did you see your shadow twin under the bed?_ becomes, _are you really still playing those silly games?_ and playmates, once inseparable, stare at each other across a chasm with pity on both their faces. 

A few, a rare few, never cross the gap to meet their fellows on the other side. A few like John, who can still see, who can still charm with the power of his belief. It’s a peculiar thing. By rights, they should recognize each other when they pass on the streets, marked by strangeness. And yet, they never do.

There’s a second rule, though it’s for the rare few, the children who grow up and remember the magic. Never draw Gotham’s attention. 

They say things about her.

They say that Gotham gives shadows as courting favors to heroes and madmen. They say there are owls living in her tunnels that can read your heart’s desire. They say that if you catch her reflection under a waxing moon, it’ll show you the face of your death. They say if you pick up a pebble from her shores, it’ll bring you the luck you deserve. 

They say she loves Batman. They say she loved the Joker and Harvey Dent.

They say she eats stories.

They say a lot of things about Gotham. 

They’re all true.

 

* * *

 

The strangest thing about the occupation is that life continues, for a given value of life. Less of it than there was, but. Bane took down the wireless towers, but the internet still provides cat videos. The postal service may be gone, but televisions still air sitcoms. What’s left of the GPD has a blog, against which the country scratches its insatiable curiosity. Gordon uses it to rattle cages, confirm the dead, and twist the knife in the bowels of a frozen federal government. He’s a canny old campaigner. 

The ways his people keep in touch outside of such public channels are less straightforward, but effective all the same. Gordon gets word of Blake’s arrival an hour before the young detective shows up at his door. When they finally do, Gordon takes in Braddox’s pallor and the blood seeping through Montoya’s pants without comment, his frown more relieved than disapproving.

 Blake blinks at him, his eyes dilating, before he flushes and looks down. Montoya averts her gaze before she’s borne away by a fussing medic. Gordon accepts the judgment of their off-center looks and hides his unreasonable hurt; it’s barely a pinprick against the enormity of this damned winter. He deserves worse than contempt. He doesn’t deserve to indulge in self-pity.

“You’ve got the devil’s own luck,” Gordon tells Blake later, leading the way down to the basement for debriefing.

“You know what they say. He looks after his own.” There are new scabs on Blake’s fingers, but Montoya is being tended to, Braddox is asleep in an empty apartment, and that’s a triumph of sorts: three went out, three came back. “I found Detective Kobayashi and Captain Mailer from the two-eight over in Haight. They’ve got thirty-two, all uniforms, but they’ve got two from TRT holed up undercover. I’ve got the info. Kobayashi’s nervous. He thinks there’s a mole somewhere. He’s been losing people.”

Gordon drops a hand on Blake’s shoulder, steadying him. Blake’s still too green to hide his thoughts; there’s guilt seated in the corners of his mouth. “Sergeant Foya?” Gordon asks.

“I’m sorry,” Blake says. “We didn’t get there in time. Bane’s men, the neighbors—“ He shifts his weight, fingernails digging into his palms.

Gordon’s hand clenches, a spasm that relaxes into apology, then understanding. “He was a good man,” he says, tired. They’ll wait a few days, but it’s only a matter of time before their snitch in Crane’s kangaroo court reports Foya’s death. It’ll go on the blog.

“We could always stage a rescue,” Blake says, like he always does.

“We could always lose more people,” Gordon retorts, like he always does. He smiles nonetheless, because Blake is looking mutinous, and Gordon is reminded yet again how young he is; sees passion and idealism in that fierce, determined face. He pats the boy on the shoulder before letting him go. Blake straightens as though refreshed and blinks at him again, his gaze drifting to something just beyond Gordon’s field of vision. 

“You wanted a hothead,” Blake points out.

“I did. I’d prefer he stay alive,” Gordon says mildly.

“Eh,” Blake says, and then grins, ragged, boyish, and Gordon is irrationally charmed yet again by this youthful reflection of himself, one more of the many who have saved his life.

The next morning, Gordon and a small team slip cross the turnpike and steal Mailer’s two TRT officers away to safety, just minutes before Bane’s men knock down the door of their hiding place. Kobayashi’s right about there being a mole. Gordon connects the snipers with a cell of cops on Grant, then dodges agitated patrols all the way back to the safe house. They’re almost caught on 3rd and Seever. A flock of pigeons rises like a fog around Bane’s men, distracting them while he slips away with a prayer on his lips.

They get back just before midnight, exhausted and worn thin. Montoya and Blake, on watch, pick him out of a dead black alley, their recognition of his presence unerring. Not for the first time, he wonders how they do that.

Montoya fusses, running blind hands over him in search of injury before he can growl and bat her away. It’s useless. She is irrepressible. She tucks an impudent hand into Gordon’s pocket and plucks out what looks like a feather, twirling it between her fingers. “He’s got the devil’s own luck,” she tells Blake, her teeth a pale shark’s grin in the dark. 

Blake grabs the feather from her. Gordon snags it from him in turn to puzzle over it. Silver hair gleams, tangled in its barbs.

“You know what they say,” Blake says vaguely.

“How’d that get in my pocket?” Gordon demands, and gets shrugs in reply.

 

* * *

 

The food Montoya found is welcome, especially the fruit. Most of it goes to the walking wounded, who are off the books in more ways than one. Rations are running thin. Gordon is wary of good luck that comes unprompted, but he can’t afford to waste opportunity, so John goes back for the rest of the cans Montoya found alone, armed with a .44 and Gordon’s pragmatic advice. He stops a few blocks over to do what he can to ensure it: broken glass to cloud watching eyes; grass to dull the sound of his feet; a coin to coax chance onto his side; a dead rat to make him fast; all poured together into a tin, and shoved into a crack for Gotham to consider.

He makes it across the city without being stopped or marked, encountering patrols twice. Their eyes slide past him as though he’s not there.

The words he chalked onto the building are half gone, absorbed by brick and scrubbed by rain. The ones he didn’t write are white and sharp against the stone, written above his to wrap around the corner of the building. He can see them from his perch across the street. 

_‘Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.’_

The handwriting is distinctive, slanted strangely, like the writer is accustomed to the shape of a different alphabet. Improbably, John has to smother a laugh. He’s unaccountably warmed by this acknowledgment of his existence, however grouchy.

He can hear the building they hid in from where he watches. There’s a snarl in its mutterings, but it’s a curiously satisfied one. It remembers him and the taste of his blood; unbidden, the flavor of iron fills his mouth and makes saliva flow, together with the awareness of men come and gone, and the tins of food still safe where they were hidden.

There’s no guarantee that they won’t come back, so he goes about his business as quickly as he can, in and out again with fear sapping time like a parasite in the back of his mind.

He’s stepping out into the street again when it occurs to him to stop and draw out his chalk. It’s risky to linger, but he takes a moment to overlay his old words with new.

_‘Youth has no age.’_

 

* * *

 

Gordon sends the tins John retrieved down to the men trapped underground, though the cops aboveground and on the run could use the rare treat. “They need the morale boost,” he says, and only Foley argues with him. John doesn’t like Foley (neither does Gotham) but Gordon tolerates him, listening with a patience that borders on the inhuman until the man has wound down and lapsed into sulks.

Even at the best of times, Gordon looks transparent, as though the edges of him are worn thin. In the darkness of the basement, it’s easier to see the way he’s seeping red-soaked light into the air, great, generous tendrils that feed hope into the men around him. It’s hard enough to watch at rest. When the others are demoralized or exhausted, Gordon almost blazes, bleeding himself dry for the benefit of others.

“Problem?” Gordon asks, when he catches John frowning into mid-air.

He has to pause for a moment to reorient, to redact his first thought. Gordon isn’t one of the few who know a world beyond their basic senses. “No offense, sir, but Foley’s kind of a dick.” 

“You always talk that way about superior officers?” Gordon asks, more curious than censorious.

“Only when they’re inferior men,” John says, and congratulates himself for the betraying twitch of Gordon’s mouth. 

 _‘To believe in youth is to look backwards,’_ say the chalked words, twelve city blocks away from where John wrote his defiance in Picasso’s memory. The handwriting is still distinct, strangely familiar for all he’s only ever seen it once before. John stares at it, the carefully crafted letters on the underside of a fire escape he has no business being on. It’s pure chance that he chose to come this way. Pure chance that a piece of masonry crumbled as he passed and drew his attention upward. He has a happy moment where he wonders if he’s going mad with too little sleep and too much stress; then another one in which he wonders if he is interjecting himself uninvited in an already ongoing conversation.

The buildings around him owe him no favors, though he can feel their awareness of him, a disdainful indifference that is slowly sharpening into curiosity. He doesn’t have chalk ready to hand, but the fragments of masonry now shattered on the pavement are made of white stone. He picks one up, checks around himself for prying eyes, and scribbles onto brick:

_‘Youth should be respected. How will you know its future will not equal your present?’_

When he’s done, he tosses the rock away and ambles off, hands in pockets, head down, carefully avoiding eye contact with other passersby.

“You look guilty about something,” Montoya says back at base. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Making friends. Defacing public property. Barfing rainbows and the milk of human kindness.”

“You had to make him a detective,” she accuses Gordon, who just smiles and says, “I really did.”

 

* * *

 

John finds the messages by apparent accident after that, two, three times a day in random locations; sometimes even more. Always the same hand, always a reply to something he’s written. It’s an old-fashioned idea to have a pen pal, especially in this madly off-kilter fashion, but there’s been a polar shift to reality under Bane’s winter, and none of the old rules seem to apply anymore.

 _‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it,’_ he writes, and, _‘The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.’_

In reply he gets, _‘Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away,’_ and _‘Conscience is but a word that cowards use.’_

“Wow, are _you_ a depressed fucker,” he tells the words, grinning more fondly than he realizes.

One Sunday, scrounging in the abandoned suites of an expensive high-rise, he finds a book of Oxford quotes that he ends up squirreling away in his pack. It weighs him down. He reads almost half of it in one sitting, but has to abandon it when they’re forced to bug out in the dead of night.

 _‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees,’_ he leaves behind on a lamppost, hoping he hasn’t strayed too far from the actual quotation.

 _‘In the end they have laid their freedom at our feet and said to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us,’_ he finds on the sidewalk below it.

 _‘An empty stomach is not a good political advisor,’_ he retorts.

_‘In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.’_

The humor is unexpected; it makes John laugh despite himself. Amusement is chased by alarm at drawing attention in a park where, incredibly, children are playing under the eyes of their mothers and the threat of nuclear destruction. Three things wait for no man: death, taxes, and a four-year-old needing entertainment.

“Napoleon,” Gordon says, coming up behind him, incongruously buried in a hoodie with the lower half of his face hidden behind a scarf. His eyes crinkle into a tight, tense smile. “I used to have that quote on my office wall, back at City Hall. No matter how many times he came in to yell at me, Garcia never seemed to notice.”

They’ve changed headquarters twice since John came back with Montoya and Braddox. Each building they move to, he negotiates with in private using whatever tools he has to hand. Gotham loves Gordon, but the city’s affection is a dangerous thing, as likely to kill as to protect. The buildings are easier to manage, whimsical though they are. John snaps pieces of himself off with each move, exchanging them for their favors: early warnings, stable shelter, whispers in the dark, camouflage. As far as he knows, nobody else with Gordon can see what John sees, or can do what he does. None of them know about the other, shadow world. It’s not a surprise. Most people don’t. He feels stretched and taut, cured hide clipped to a drum frame. 

It’s a lonely business. 

“What do you see?” John asks Montoya, sitting beside her on the roof of the Daggett building.

She shrugs, her mouth set crookedly against pain. Drugs are hard to come by these days. Only the most heavily injured are getting the pills they can scavenge. “I see fucking Bane,” she says, and lowers the binoculars.

John exhales to steady his hands and peers through the scope. Bane fills it, standing on the steps of the main library, too far away for John’s sniping skills. He’s speaking to some of his men, the cadre that has appeared around him for every one of his public, televised appearances. The library is an odd place to find him, but it’s an imposing backdrop for the terrorist’s bulk. It’s the first time John has seen him in person, outside of the filter provided by television and video. Television doesn’t show the smoky eddy of black trailing behind coat-clad shoulders, or the way the library’s stone lions turn their heads to breathe in insubstantial feathers. He counts four pairs of light-blotting wings before Bane turns his head to look at him, look right at him, as though he knows John is watching and can make eye contact atop a building three miles away.

John jerks back and drops to set his back to the parapet, shock and sudden terror clawing at his lungs. 

“What do you see?” Montoya demands.

“Fucking Bane,” he pants.

“Is that all you saw?”

He glances up. She does too. There’s a tornado of black feathers whirling into the sky.

“Aw, _fuck_ ,” she says.

“Shit,” he breathes, fury warring with relief and terror. “You _see_.”

“Talk later,” she snaps. “Run now.”

He sees nothing to argue about in that. They run.

 

* * *

 

They compare notes. Montoya can see what John can see, but she can’t do what John can do. “Different things,” she says, showing her teeth in a feral grin. “Women’s things.” Which means nothing to John, but now that he knows to look for them, he finds her marks everywhere. He can’t figure out what any of them do.

“For God’s sake, it’s not that complicated,” Montoya says, exasperated, as she deconstructs another charm and gets nothing but a blank stare in return.

“It makes no sense,” John protests.

“Bane’s a fucking angel!” Montoya snarls. “How does sense even enter into it?”

He has nightmares about those wings.

“Maybe we saw it wrong,” he suggests without hope. “The sun was pretty bright that day.”

“Sure we did. Because being out in the sun always makes me see wings.”

“What do you see me when you look at me?” It’s a question they used to ask each other in the orphanage. Most people, even people who see, look like themselves: simply human, unremarkable. In the orphanage, they were always eager to be one of the rare ones marked by Gotham: destined to walk with giants. Stupidity isn’t the sole provenance of the young, but sometimes it feels like it’s the majority shareholder.

Montoya shrugs. “You’re just a guy,” she says, then reassures when he sighs, “You’re not the ugliest guy I’ve ever seen. Mostly. What do you see when you look at me?”

John shrugs back. Montoya looks like Montoya. Human. Solid. Fragile.

She slaps him upside the head, proving yet again that her fragility is more in his mind than hers, and says without concern, “Only one special here is the Commish.”

“Gordon’s bleeding himself dry,” he tells her, reminded that this is also something they can share. “We have to do something, or he’ll drop down dead before this is over.” 

She looks at him with pity. “Rookie. He’s always been like that.”

Another unfathomable thing.

The halving of the burden does nothing to ease the feeling of isolation, in particular or in general. All of his cop friends are trapped in the sewers. All the ones he associates with above are his superiors or senior to him; there’s camaraderie, but little friendship. He misses his partner, Ross. Civilians are too dangerous to associate with much.

He tries to flirt with Montoya. She laughs at him. 

“Seriously? You’re hitting on me?”

“You looked bored,” he excuses. 

“Bored enough to sleep with you?”

“Weirder things have happened.”

She grins, her gaze moving pointedly past him. He cranes his neck to look; Officer Benedict smiles through her lashes at them. No, not at them. At her. At Montoya. 

“Oh,” he says.

“Your observation skills are for shit,” Montoya says kindly.

“The problem isn’t my observation skills,” he retorts, trying hard not to be too embarrassed. “It’s my unbounded optimism.”

“And you call yourself a cop,” she says, and musses his hair before he can dodge away.

He picks up a sad-eyed woman in a rations line and goes back with her to her empty apartment.  There’s a ring on her finger, and the pictures on the walls show her posing with a smiling man and two smiling children. John fucks her roughly on her living room floor, then tenderly in her bed. She calls a different man’s name when she comes, but doesn’t apologize; John finishes as quickly as he can, trying to believe her reassurances and not her sobs.

He kisses away her tears and holds her until she sleeps, then lets himself out, leaving behind regrets but no expectations.

For days afterwards, he feels restless and vaguely dissatisfied, like he’s lost something important. 

 _‘The most terrible poverty is loneliness,_ ’ he writes.

 _‘We live as we dream — alone,_ ’ he gets.

“Fuck Bane,” he tells Montoya.

“Preach it, sister,” she says.

 

* * *

 

He builds an image of his pen pal (graffiti pal?) in his mind, because imagination is what he has when they’re always on the move and have to make their own fun. Young, because of the cynicism. Then old, he speculates, or middle aged, because the variety of the replies has run the gamut from Shakespeare to Schopenhauer. The only way John keeps up is by virtue of his own childhood isolation and greed for survival; he’s not the only aged-out orphan with an expansive repertoire of quotations. Gotham’s buildings have always demanded payment, and the thoughts of the dead are a cheaper price than the blood of the living.

Middle aged, John concludes eventually, or at any rate older than him. And, he decides after a fast-paced exchange about the corruption inherent in humanity, hurt in spirit, though still possessed of an appealingly black sense of humor.

‘ _Everyone is going to hurt you,’_ he writes one night, out of a Bob Marley biography half-read by candlelight. _‘You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.’_

 _‘True friends stab you in the front,_ ’ comes the dry agreement, and John simply stands and grins for a moment before he shuffles away.

It’s an odd way to start a friendship, never seeing the man—woman?—or knowing him only through other people’s words. From time to time, lacking appropriate quotations, he lets his own words through. The buildings don’t seem to care; unusually enough, they accept originality with as much satisfaction as they do the rest. The replies he gets are intelligent, humorous, wise, and observant. It gets so he starts walking a little quicker on his way to search for the next response, hope fluttering in his chest. It’s a small joy, but they’ve learned to cherish small joys.

For that alone he’d be grateful. That he also gains a friend in these hard times is nothing less than a gift.

 _Are you and yours safe?_ he asks, thinking of the men who moved through his flophouse last night, a check on faces that grabbed an excitable homeless man but failed to snag a cop in civvies. _Do you need help?_

_‘The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.’_

_Is that Marcus Aurelius?_

_Tacitus._

_‘The desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.’_

_Well done._

“Asshole,” John tells the wall, amused at the condescension he hears behind the prim approval. In his imagination—because he designs its actors and sets so he can cast it as he sees fit—his correspondent’s voice is the quiet, smooth baritone of Bruce Wayne. 

_I notice you didn’t answer me._

_‘Ignorance is strength.’_

_Fine. Be that way. Stay safe,_ John writes, conscious of regret.

_Thank you._

 

* * *

 

“Tell everyone to be more careful,” John tells one of the St. Swithin kids, while the boy carves bats in the playground dirt with filthy fingernails. “They’re watching. No more signs. If Batman’s coming back, he’s coming back. If he isn’t….“

The bats that John and the orphans leave on walls and doors, windows and sidewalks, are for Gotham. A reminder. _You love him_ , is the message. _Give him back._ Other citizens, deaf and blind to Gotham’s whims, have been picking it up. They’ve developed the dangerous habit without knowing what they’re doing or why they’re doing it beyond the belief that they’re showing defiance in the doing of it. 

Stupid.

Some Blackgate men caught some kids spray-painting a bat on an overpass. They shot one. The other they threw over the bridge.

“Are you listening to me?” John demands.

Mark shrugs. “I’ll tell them,” he says without conviction.

“Promise me. No more bats.”

Mark’s shoulders rise towards his ears and don’t come down. It isn’t a promise. “She’s starting to like him,” he tells the dirt. 

“She?”

“Gotham.”

“Starting to like who? Gordon? She’s always liked—“

“No. Bane.”

“How do you know?”

Mark shoves a hand into his pocket and draws out a handful of downy black feathers. They gleam in the shadow cast by St. Swithin’s thick wall. John picks one up with the care of a man dismantling a bomb. It flutters in the breeze, caught, then fades into smoke when touched by sunlight.

“They’re everywhere,” Mark says.

John slaps at his hand, letting the feathers free. They drift off, riding the draft, and disintegrate one by one while John watches.

Mark scratches another bat into the dirt.

“No more bats,” John says.

“Fine,” Mark says, and scratches another one next to the first. 

“And no more feathers.”

Mark rolls his eyes. 

John scuffs out the bats.

Two days later, Mark is dead.

 _‘Unhappy is a land in need of heroes,’_ John writes that night on the sidewalk where Mark died. He’s exhausted and reckless with grief. 

_‘When a man is in despair, it means he still believes in something.’_

_Aren’t you going to tell me that believing in something is for fools or madmen?_

_Are you the one or the other?_

He’s no more sure of the answer than the person asking. It takes him hours to reply, the answer finally scratched into stone under the umbrella of a stubborn, fading street light: 

_No more murdered children._

_Is that a hope?_

_That’s a purpose._

When he wakes up in the morning, his answer is waiting for him on the wall across the street. 

_You are no fool._

 

* * *

 

SIx days later, he’s stupid.

 _‘He who stands for nothing will fall for anything,’_ is the quote he’s answering, the continuation of an argument that has taken up six city blocks and two cans of spray paint. John has already established that his pen pal is perfectly willing to quote people he has nothing but contempt for, otherwise. Given his friend’s previously expressed disdain for the parochialism of the founding fathers, John is readying his sidewalk chalk for another charge of hypocrisy when he feels the prickle of warning on the back of his neck.

He made his treaty with the building already, but it's been been moody all month; the warning of danger is too late. He whirls, ready to run, but they’re already there:  four of Bane’s men, eyes flat and hard over face cloths and automatic weapons.

John drops the chalk. Holds up his hands to show they’re empty. The chalk rolls across the sidewalk to bump against a terrorist’s shoe.

“I wasn’t breaking curfew,” John says. He presses his back against the wall and feels the shape of the revolver tucked at his hip, under the windbreaker that’s barely doing its job.

It’s worse that it’s Bane’s men, who are soldiers and fanatics, unmoved by appeals to sympathy or greed. They’re a breed apart. One of them looks at the words John has already written up on the brick—reads them, without expression—then turns his chilly stare back to John. The man gestures with the butt of his gun: turn. It’s a pantomime that John himself has performed before, more times than he can count. Hands against the wall. Spread ‘em. When John was a cop, it was a coordinated dance accompanied by the jingle of handcuffs and the creak of a nightstick in leather. The silence of Bane’s men is more dangerous, because it comes with terminal consequences. 

There’s a single, suspended moment where he almost runs for it, his spine already spasming around the bullet it’ll take before he makes it a yard. Metal rasps, gloved hands shifting against guns. John looks at the leader of the men, and meets human eyes.

He turns and presses his palms hard into stone, his nails scraping across it.

They frisk him with practiced hands. They pull the guns from his hip and right ankle (obvious) and the knife at his shoulder and his calf (less so). They grope his balls unlovingly, and find the small Swiss Army knife strapped to his thigh. It’s just big enough to reach the jugular. A jugular. Any jugular. Or a femoral artery, if he could make a longer handle for it. 

They arrange his weapons in their hands, adding to them the watch that can double as brass knuckles. Then they turn him so he can look at their collective accusation. 

“It’s a dangerous city,” John says, walking the thin line between belligerence and apology. “I have to defend myself.”

Their leader looks past him again at the wall, at the writing on it. He stoops—the deliberation of his movement is specific and scripted: flex of back, stretch of arm, cant of head, curl of fingers—then straightens to thrust his hand at John, the chalk a fat-bodied judgment in the palm of his hand.

“Finish,” he says. He doesn’t blink.

John’s heart contracts, convinced of the inevitable sequence towards death. He takes the chalk anyway. 

The answer he was writing was going to be flippant. Emerson. _‘The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.’_ He has the first three words done, but under the steady gazes boring into him he crosses each word out, one at a time.

 _‘Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets,’_ he writes instead. It will have to do as a good-bye.

He turns and looks at his captors, who are studying the wall. The leader extends his hand again. John places the chalk in it with care, precise, fingertips not touching skin. They stand there in a tableau, John framed by words, the others framed by Bane’s invisible presence. Then:

“Run,” says the leader.

John squints, taken aback. The gunmen step back, making a clearer path for him. There’s a trick in here somewhere, a certainty that the minute he turns his back, they’ll shoot him down. It’s irrational to find this somehow worse than being shot face to face. Equally irrational to believe that making eye contact is somehow stopping them at all. But. He backs a step away.

Two more men—reinforcements, made of rougher stuff—cross the street, dragging along a protesting, struggling kid. One of the men holds a spray can. It’s an odd accessory to go with the guns at his hips, but there are white speckles across the kid’s dark shirt. He can’t be more than ten.

John takes another step, but not towards escape.

“Caught this one drawing bats,” says one of the newcomers, his accent pure Gotham. He sketches a sloppy, awkward salute at the leader of the men who caught John, puffing up his own greater size while shifting his feet in an uneasy shuffle. “We were ordered to bring them in instead of just shooting them.”

His voice trails off. John has the sudden, odd feeling that the leader’s attention is on him, rather than the trio that have joined them. The kid’s babble is background noise, the kind of youthful braggadocio that John has heard a hundred times before. 

“What should we do with him, brother?” asks the Gothamite.

Bane’s man says, coldly, “You are no brother of mine.” 

John’s limbic system seizes control before self-preservation can. It’s a surreal moment; he watches himself as though from a distance, appalled by his own stupidity. By the time the leader has his gun unholstered and pointing at the kid’s head, John is standing between them, his back to the trio, his chest touched by the muzzle.

His face is numb. His tongue is a block of wood. “No more murdered kids,” he manages to say nonetheless, meeting the leader’s green eyes over the gun. 

There’s swearing behind him. The kid, at least, has shut up. He has a clear image of the leader’s thoughtful look, a strangely unsurprised curiosity in them, before something hard smashes into the back of his head. He goes down in a jackstraw game of pain. There’s shouting, none of it his. He rolls instinctively, just in time to escape the worst of a kick to his ribs, and reaches to grab for a swinging leg. 

“Enough,” says the leader. 

It takes a second for the sound to register, the unmistakeable hiss of guns being adjusted. John uncurls enough to look up; there’s no dignity to be found here, facing death on his back, but at least he’ll do it with eyes open. Not that it matters to anyone but him. But the guns aren’t pointed in his direction.

“We’re on your side!” one of the Gothamites protests. He backpedals away from the line of cold muzzles and colder eyes staring at him. The kid is released in the scramble. He flails, then falls, sitting down hard.

“Enough,” says the leader again, without emotion. “Your orders stand. Leave the boy.”

The mutters are audible from where John lies frozen, a choice selection of pure American obscenity. But the two are outnumbered, and not inclined to argue when Bane’s retribution is notoriously draconian. They shuffle off with several backward glances. John looks back up at the leader, who stares down at him. Behind him, the guns lower.

The leader quirks up an eyebrow. It looks like a question.

“No more murdered kids,” John repeats hoarsely.

The other man nods. Without comment, he slings his gun back over his shoulder and tosses John’s wallet onto his chest. Then he walks off, his compatriots following him.

John and the boy, still sprawled open and graceless on the concrete, stare after them with mouths wide open.

“What just happened?” the boy asks for them both.

John has no answers.

He hauls the boy after him back to the wall, ignoring attempts at escape (“Safest place for you right now is next to me, kid,”) and loud opinions about his sanity. (“Why the fuck are we still here?”)

 _Was that because of you?_ John writes in sloping, ugly letters, while the boy keeps reluctant watch. His chalk snaps in half, crumbling under the pressure of his fingers.

“You’re fucking nuts,” the kid says. “Are you nuts? What the fuck are you doing?”

The street is empty. “Run,” John tells him, not recognizing his own voice.

The kid doesn’t wait to be told twice.

The next day John returns to the wall and leans on it, his mouth full of bile.

_It will always be me._

 

* * *

 

It was one thing to have as a friend—Jesus fucking Christ, a _friend_ —a harmless civilian caught up in Gotham’s bad winter. It’s another altogether to befriend one of the faceless, dead-eyed causes of it. John applies logic to the situation and comes up empty-handed. ‘The suspect,’ he christens his correspondent in his head, struggling to distance himself from the situation. The suspect is probably in Bane’s organization. Is probably one of the men Bane brought with him. High up in that hierarchy, if his graffiti conversations with John have led to recognition and a certain level of consideration from the rest of them.

He spends a sleepless night with his eyes wide open in the dark, listening to quiet snores around him, and debates telling Gordon. There are a million reasons why he should, and only one reason why he shouldn’t. Friendship is— is it friendship? He doesn’t have enough of them left that he can even tell anymore. Surely having his life given back to him is worth something, even if it’s only small change against what’s happening to Gotham. On the other hand, he’s important enough to one of Bane’s men that he earned his life back. Maybe he can do more than just that. Learn something. Turn him. He should feel more betrayal at discovering what his friend is, but he’s used to being stabbed in the back: by the system, by guardians, by society at large. Maybe it’s fucked up, but at least Bane’s man, whoever he is, never lied to him. At least there’s that.

He doesn’t tell Gordon.

 _What’s happening is wrong,_ he writes in a secluded building after a silence of two days, in which he can feel the suspect’s presence from across the city. _People are dying._

_All people die._

_They don’t have to. You’re helping a terrorist._

_I am dealing justice. You of all people should appreciate that._

_How is this justice? Criminals free, civilians hiding, cops being hunted down, murder by class?_

_‘There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.’_

_You’re not striking at the root. You’re burning down the forest._

_Yes,_ the suspect writes, and nothing more. Just that one word.

Yes.

John lets days pass and doesn’t reply.

“Have you seen this?” Montoya asks, catching up with him in a makeshift canteen, somewhere in the bowels of what used to be Market Street.

She turns her phone to show him its display, and he’s suddenly looking at their entire conversation, caught on that single, stupid wall. 

He buys himself time, displacing the sudden roar in his ears through habit, the way he hides the anger or the sharp silver of knowledge he shouldn’t have. He zooms in, frowning at the display and thumbing the picture from side to side as though reading the words for the first time. 

“Okay?” he says, inviting comment. 

“Dumb way to have a conversation, out in the open.”

He looks at the phone again, fiddling with it. “Sounds like one of them is a collaborator. Or working for Bane.”

She takes her phone back. “Sounds like one of them is gonna get shot if he keeps up his end of the conversation,” she says. “Want to stake out the place with me? See who it is, maybe pick up one of Bane’s guys or at least talk some sense into one of Gotham’s good citizens?”

John shakes his head. He’s not going back to that wall, anyway. “Too risky. Besides. Some people can’t be helped,” he adds with perfect truth.

 _‘It is human nature to hate the man you have hurt,’_ the suspect leaves on the sidewalk in front of John’s apartment building, after three more days of silence.

The placement is too precise and specific to be chance. He knows who John is. John remembers the flip of his wallet, the flicker of his captor’s eyes as they skimmed across his ID. 

The back of his head tingles with the certainty that it’s being viewed through a scope. 

 _Do you hate me?_ he writes, ignoring the tremor in his hand.

_No._

_I don’t hate you._

_You will._

 

* * *

 

John told Wayne that he recognized Batman because of his eyes. 

It was a truth, but not the whole truth. He recognized Batman because Bruce Wayne came visiting St. Swithin with a beautiful woman on his arm, and in his chest where his heart should have been, there was nothing but a hole. 

Orphans. They’re a dangerous breed, orphans. Bruce Wayne of all people should have known that. They cheered, and they flocked, and they asked for autographs, but most of all, they saw.

“He sold his soul to the devil,” Harry told the other kids. 

“Rich people don’t care about anyone but themselves,” said Miguel. “Their hearts are dead.”

“It’s because he’s in love,” sighed Autumn. “He gave his heart away.”

John knew different, but then, he’d seen more than the emptiness. He’d seen Bruce Wayne’s eyes. The hole was bigger when he saw Wayne last, its boundaries hazy across Wayne’s face. John never had a chance to see Batman, to learn whether there was something in that blackness when the suit was on.

He’s heading high in a building, looking for a good view over the street. There’ll be a convoy heading down it in a few hours, one of the several that are roving the streets of Gotham, oddly armed and heavily fortified. Gordon wants to know which one is the real bomb. So would John. So would everyone else. Being able to see doesn’t help him any there, though at least being able to listen does; the building he’s in urges him _up, up, up,_ proud of the view it has of the neighborhood and the number of pigeons that roost there.

He’s treading up the stairs and turning on a landing when there’s a sense of apology, an _oh, guess what_ , a little bit sheepish, a lot more smug, and a door pops opens on a room full of bedraggled people in suits:  self-importance emptied out, arrogance burnt to paper ashes. They stare at him, their eyes framed in red and wrinkles; he stares back, astonished. 

“You’re better groomed than most of Bane’s men,” says an old man, seated comfortably apart from the others with a dark-haired woman at his side. 

The rest of his companions cower, but Lucius Fox doesn’t bow to anyone. He’s blurred at the edges, like—smoke? No, like water, ripples of it that spread beyond his feet and seep into the ground like it’s returning to its source there—and it takes a few blinks before John can focus on his face.

“Mr. Fox,” he blurts out. “We heard you were dead.”

“I hate to disappoint,” Fox says amiably, “but reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.” His inspection of John is thoughtful, penetrating without being intrusive. “You’re one of Jim’s?”

‘Jim,’ John places as ‘Gordon’ after a blank moment, and regards Fox with immediate suspicion. 

His smile is gentle. “A name would do for starters. It appears you have the advantage of me. This is Miranda Tate. And you are?”

“Blake,” he says, but he’s not really paying attention. Miranda Tate’s eyes are marbles, transparent and inhuman like a cat’s, yellow-green eye shine caught frozen in the dark. There’s a strange, red glow between her breasts, a fire where Bruce Wayne only has a hole. 

“Mr. Blake.” Fox’s smile grows. “Best be on your way, Mr. Blake.”

He scampers up to find his vantage point, going through the motions while the building buzzes proudly in the back of his mind. 

Gordon comes back with him later, wary of traps. There’s nothing duplicitous about Fox, though there’s that smile again, warmer for Gordon, that suggests the old CEO earned his name in every way but shape. There’s honest pleasure in Gordon’s face as well, though that fades quickly enough once Fox starts talking. The truth behind the bomb. The irrevocable countdown. The consequences.

They’re none of them smiling by the time he’s done talking. Gordon’s shoulders are sagging, his face drawn down as though the flesh is drawing away from the skull. 

“Two months,” he says hoarsely. The red tendrils of him contract, wrapping around his torso like bandages around an open wound. 

John feels chilled. Fox drops a hand onto Gordon’s shoulder and squeezes.

Gordon’s wraps his hand around Fox’s forearm. For a long time they stand there in silence, two old warriors facing another war. Then Gordon shakes his head, sighs, and lifts his head with a grimace. The red that was shielding him expands, bleeding out again: into John, into Fox, into Ms. Tate. “Well, we’d better figure something out then, shouldn’t we?”

Beside John, Ms. Tate narrows her eyes. She murmurs, “He’s a remarkable man, isn’t he? The commissioner. I thought Bane had killed him. I heard rumors, of course.”

“He’s been keeping us alive,” John says. Gordon’s unrolling a map on the ground for Fox, debriefing him on the observations they’ve made of Bane’s men and their movements. Some of that intel, John gathered. “He’s been trying to figure out how to take back the city anyway. This just speeds up the timeline.”

“But he’s so … old,” Ms. Tate says helplessly, and then chuckles quietly, spontaneously, covering her mouth with her fingers. “How horrible. That wasn’t what I meant at all. It’s just so unexpected. He doesn’t look anything at all as dangerous as his reputation makes him out to be.”

“He’s stubborn.”

“And the police force is almost all buried underground. There can’t be more than a few dozen aboveground.”

Her voice is grave, pitching low towards worry. John smothers his own fretfulness and says, bracing, “I wouldn’t count us out yet, Ms. Tate.”

“Call me Miranda,” she says, touching his arm with a gentle hand, face upturned to his.

She’s warm at his side. John looks down at her smile, and feels his heart beat a little faster. 

 

* * *

 

There are giants walking Gotham. This isn’t, in and of itself, new. Gotham has always spawned giants. John sits on the rooftops, ignoring the hollow spaces behind his ribs, and scribbles their initials on pebbles. He drops them and then plays at drawing dirt lines between them to show where they connect. Fox and Miranda paired, that’s natural. Fox and Gordon likewise, if he thinks about it. Gordon and Batman, pursuer and partner—and then there’s Bane, outside it all. Bane, whose feathers occasionally drift high overhead, lasting longer in sunlight now, but still melting when they touch Gotham’s concrete.

 _‘If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other,’_ John writes, blatant now in his scribbles, challenging Bane’s soldiers from where they watch on the library steps.

_‘The condition of man … is a condition of war against everyone.’_

_I know what Bane is planning. How can you go along with this?_

_‘No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.’_

_I don’t believe you._

_You should._

John collects the pebbles in his jacket pockets. He runs them through his fingers, rolling them across his thumb: ‘LF,’ ‘MT,’ ‘JG,’ ‘Bat,’ ‘Bane.’ It’s a Gothamite’s rosary, street stones and permanent marker. He spills them out onto his hand from time to time, entertaining himself with the pretense that they’re oracular. They aren’t. Bane’s pebble bumps up against ‘MT’ with coy regularity, ignoring ‘Bat’ and ‘JG’ completely. ‘Bat’ keeps falling off his hand altogether, until he finally loses it down a storm drain. 

Miranda’s is green with a vein of white running through it. Bane’s pebble is rough on one side, polished glass on the other. As a metaphor, it’s sort of lacking. 

“You’re running risks you can’t afford,” Gordon says one day, sinking down next to him on a park bench. Pigeons immediately congregate, their tiny bird brains captivated by the drift of crimson around the commissioner. Gordon flicks his fingers out, sprinkling crumbs in a loose semi-circle around them. 

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“You’re running risks _we_ can’t afford,” Gordon amends, looking out over the frost-riddled green. It’s been a week since they’ve spoken, and John has been spending much of his time at St. Swithin and other children’s shelters, helping where he can. There aren’t enough adult volunteers left to fight for supplies at the trucks. As always, kids are the ones to suffer when things go wrong. 

John lines up for six trucks a day; fights for food at least twice a day.

He hasn’t eaten a solid meal in three days, but the kids at St. Anne’s have. He considers that a personal victory.

“I’m not leading anybody back to the others,” he argues.

Gordon’s glance is kind. “We can’t afford to lose you,” he explains patiently, and John is left feeling unbalanced and uncomfortable.

“Oh,” he says.

Silence falls, but it’s a restful silence. Gordon keeps feeding the pigeons. “How bad is it?” he asks, eventually.

John considers the question, the shape of it, trying to figure out what ‘it’ is. ‘The city,’ he assumes at first, then changes his mind and decides Gordon means, ‘how bad is it for you.’ Then he realizes that these are simple things to specify; that by leaving the question open to possibilities, Gordon has left it to him to decide what is most important.

“The kids are starving,” he says, because that’s fact. That’s literal. Bane’s winter is too big for him to fight—too big for one normal man to do anything about, for a man who isn’t Gordon or Batman—but starving kids, John can do something about that. It’s a problem he can grapple with, and win.

Gordon just nods. Crime is his domain, but all of Gotham is his business. “Driver and Seoh can help with the supply trucks,” he says. 

“I don’t want to put anyone else in danger,” John says, after a second where he almost chokes on gratitude. 

He hears a small, amused snort. “Is that why you’re staying away?”

John is staying away because he doesn’t want to lead anyone watching his graffiti conversations back to Gordon. He doesn’t say anything.

“Driver and Seoh,” Gordon says again. He dusts his hands off, done with the pigeons. They coo adoringly, not done with him. “I’ll send them to Sacred Heart on 4th. They can work with Sister Genevieve there.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s our job, son.”

It is, but. “Thanks,” John says to his loosely clasped hands.

He feels, rather than sees, Gordon’s smile. “You never need to thank me.”

John huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. “None of this makes any sense. He’s going to kill us all anyway, but he feeds us.”

“Most of us.”

“Why not just let us starve to death? What the fuck is going through his brain?”

“Are you volunteering to ask him?”

The question is honestly curious. John presses his thumb against the knuckle of his middle finger, where the callus from years of clutching pencils has yet to wear away. 

Gordon sighs, pushing himself up to his feet as though he’s every inch the old man he should be. “Do what you can,” he says, fumbling in his pockets. He finds a glove in one and pulls it on. “Don’t get caught.”

John waits until Gordon is long out of sight, safely away from being swept up in any patrol that might pick him up. The bodega next to the park is boarded shut and abandoned, but there’s a nice, empty side of wall beside the door that hasn’t been tagged yet.

 _Tell me about him_ , John writes with permanent marker on across the brick. _Bane_. 

He finishes scrawling the name, then has to stop. There’s weight on his shoulders that wasn’t there when he started. The hair on the back of his neck rises. They’re prey instincts, bred into some distant ancestor, that give it the edge to pass down its genes. Something huge is watching, they warn him. Something large, something dangerous, something unfathomable. His fingers whiten on the pen as he turns, prepared to meet— what?

Nothing. Nothing that wasn’t there already. Cement. Glass. Lights. Wanderers. But Gotham is watching him. He can feel her fascination.

He shifts, his legs braced, and feels illogical heat through his jacket where he’s pressed against stone that should be cold. 

“He’s going to kill you,” John blurts out, a madman talking to thin air. “Don’t you get it? He’s going to level you to the ground!”

A passing pedestrian deliberately averts her gaze and walks faster to get past him. Gotham purrs in his ear, like a deep-voiced woman seeing her lover naked for the first time.

Bane. Fucking Bane. 

 _What’s he like?_ he writes, his writing clumsy with exhausted fury.

_‘Sin, death, and hell have set their marks upon him, And all their ministers attend on him.’_

_Would he really kill an entire city just to make some stupid point? Women? Children?_

_Yes._

_Would you?_

_Bane’s words are my words. His thoughts are my thoughts._

John touches the words with bare fingers, rubbing them across the chalk as though erasing them would change the sentiment. Resignation presses down on him like burial dirt, completely foreign to him and _not his._ He jerks his hand back. The feeling fades.

 _I don’t believe you,_ he lies. The lingering taste of suicidal certainty is sour in his mouth. _Why’re you following him? Why destroy Gotham?_

_Hate. And love._

_I don’t understand._

_Be grateful that you do not._

Gotham leans over his shoulder as he reads, her interest avid. He tosses away his pen and walks away, daring someone to follow him. If someone does, he doesn’t see them.

 

* * *

 

Hunger makes him do stupid things. It makes him emotional. Angry. Angrier. Two days later, he stops a supply truck unarmed, and faces down a squad of Bane’s men.

They stare at him over their guns. He glowers back. “There are kids starving,” he tells them. “Give me the food.” 

They keep staring at him.

“Please,” he thinks to add as an afterthought.

It shouldn’t work. 

It works.

They push him into the passenger seat, wedging him between them while he directs them: to St. Mary’s; to Giving Hands; then, after a long, silent argument with himself, an unremarkable brownstone with strangely fortified security. Two of them help him carry boxes to the front gate, where he buzzes to let the people inside know where they are. The greater tragedy of Gotham doesn’t magically eradicate the brutal, domestic ones of daily life. They leave the boxes just inside the gate. John pulls the men away. They come without complaint or question.

“Thank you,” he tells them, sincere.

They blink at him. “You are welcome,” one says in flawless English.

Maybe they follow him back to his apartment. Maybe they don’t. He doesn’t care, too giddy with triumph, invicible. He stoops to pick up a black pebble. Then, as an afterthought, a nondescript grey one. The black one will do as a replacement for Batman’s. He writes his own initials on the grey one, then is too embarrassed to add it to the collection of special ones. He throws it away.

He prowls the spray-painted squalor of what used to be penthouses, and collects books soiled by rain, snow, piss, and grease. In the still, grey cold of the early night, fuzzy-headed and starving, he writes, _‘The ache for home lives with all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.’_

There is no reply for a day, and then:

_'Marvelous are the innocent.’_

He finds a black feather in his sleeping bag, and can’t figure out where it came from. It’s faded away by the time dawn rolls around.

 

* * *

 

Gordon is gone from headquarters when he checks in a few days later, but Montoya is in the canteen, her face smudged but triumphant. She holds up an oblong white shape between thumb and forefinger to welcome him. It takes John a second to recognize it; it’s been a few months.

“Is that an egg?” he asks, awed.

She laughs and tosses it to him; he fumbles it with fingers gone embarrassingly clumsy.

“Hard-boiled, no less,” she tells him, and shows her teeth in a grin too thrilled and young for her face. It suits her. “Bane’s guys are better at guarding bombs than supply trucks. Don’t even ask.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” he promises. 

He sinks down next to her at the table. She’s already pulled another one out of her pocket and is peeling it, taking her time with obvious relish. 

Montoya casts him a sidelong glance. “You look different,” she tells him.

“What do you mean, different?” John asks.

Montoya frowns, her eyes shifting to search the space around him. She shakes her head. “Just different,” she says, and bites into her egg with strong, even teeth. 

“Like crap, you mean.”

“We all look like crap.” She takes another bite, sighs and closes her eyes, then opens them again. “Except Miranda Tate.”

John’s heart skips a beat. He starts picking at his egg’s shell. “Is she here?” he asks, with an attempt at nonchalance.

Montoya raises her eyebrows at him. He picks a little harder. “Oh, rookie.” There’s nothing but amusement in her voice. At least it isn’t pity.

“Shut up,” he says. “It’s not like that. She’s just interesting, is all. Did you notice her breasts— her breast? Her chest. Her— Goddammit.”

Montoya laughs, her gaze slipping past him. He hunches his shoulders. 

“It’s nice to hear laughter,” Miranda says behind him. 

John doesn’t jump. He doesn’t. He rises with dignity and only trips over his chair a little bit.

“You can have mine,” Montoya says easily, rising herself. “I was just heading back out on patrol.”

“I was—“ John begins, meets Miranda’s smiling eyes, and loses his train of thought. The fire between her breasts is banked for the moment, barely a glimmer. It burns black. “Um,” he says, trying not to stare at it, and dives around the back of the other chair to hold it for her.

Her chuckle warms him. “I’d forgotten what it’s like to be a lady,” she says, sitting down. Like everyone else, she’s wrapped in layers of clothing against the cold. What would be ungainly on other people, she wears with simple elegance. “Thank you, John.”

His ears burn. His hair isn’t long enough to hide it, but he ducks his head anyway as he sits, obedient to her inviting gesture. The egg in his hand is only half-peeled; he offers it to her without looking, swallowing saliva. 

She takes it, her mouth twitching wryly. “When I was young, eggs were a rare treat. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had one to myself.”

“You can have it. Montoya had some extras. I’m not hungry,” he lies. He’s always hungry, but he’s used to that.

“You are a true gentleman.” Miranda sounds amused. She begins picking at the cracked shell. “I had a friend when I was a child who would bring me an egg when he could. He would boil it in a tin can over a fire and tell me a story, how Elephant Wife was afraid that Man, who was greedy and treacherous, would steal the sun, so that he could have it for himself and not share it with the people of the desert. So whenever the sun was finished with its work for the day, Elephant Wife would put it for safekeeping inside an egg. That was why they glowed even in the dark. To remind us of what the world would be if Man was allowed to have everything he wanted.”

John watches her peel the shell off, setting each geometric fragment onto the table in a ragged line. He used to do the same thing with M&M’s when he was a kid, hoarding the meagre allowance of them he got and counting them out one by one so he could make them last. 

“Where was this?” he asks.

Her mouth curls. “Long ago. Far away.” The black fire in her chest is warming, shifting towards a quieter gold. “I think he told me the story because it kept me distracted while it cooked. It was always finished when he was.”

“Sounds like a smart guy.”

Miranda chuckles over the last piece of shell, and looks up at him. His heart stutters in his chest. “His like will never walk this earth again,” she says, placing the last piece delicately on the table. She offers the egg back to him, its fatter end balanced on a tripod of her fingertips. “I won’t take it from you.”

“I don’t need it.”

“You might as well. One of my childhood dreams was to someday eat as many eggs as I wanted.”

Her grimace is rueful, and he grins despite himself; he knows how this story ends. 

“Did you?” he asks. 

“Eventually.” Her glance at him is half-hidden behind her lashes. “I bought three cartons, boiled one, fried the second, and scrambled the third. I was ill for days afterwards. It was not the most dignified moment of my life.” 

He takes the egg back from her. “I still can’t look at an M&M without feeling queasy,” he admits.

“Something else we share.”

“Something else?” he asks without thinking, and she says, kindly, “Besides Bane. Of course.”

He feels stupid, and doesn’t know why. “Of course,” he says. Just to be polite. 

“But he can’t be all that bad, I suppose. Did you hear that his men are protecting the children?”

“Protecting them?”

“There was an announcement. Hadn’t you heard?” She studies him. “He said he would punish those who harmed children. His men have started hunting pedophiles from the prison and beating them to death.”

He puts down the egg, his appetite suddenly gone. 

“Isn’t that curious?” Miranda asks, and smiles.

It makes him nervous. Uneasy. Guilty, because he should tell Gordon, but hasn’t, for reasons he’s to embarrassed to admit. It’s a dangerous secret. He could give them all away in a thousand different ways, unsuspecting. But. 

No more murdered children. 

 _Are you my friend?_ he writes, feeling stupid and young at even asking the question.

_Are you mine?_

Unanswerable. _Bane is protecting the children. Was that because of you?_

_It was because of you._

_Why would he do that for me?_

No reply.

He’s lonely. Ross always knew what to say to jerk his head out of his ass, but John’s partner is stuck underground at the intersection of 3rd and Pike. The exchanges they manage are too short and dangerous to convey much. 

John heads down to St. Swithin. He hasn’t visited in a few days, and the kids are happy to see him. He’s glad to see they’ve got more energy, though their faces are still sunken and thin.

“Did you see that?” Father Reilly asks, nodding out the window.

 _What would you do with a future?_ asks a billboard, high above the streets on the roof across from the orphanage.

John recognizes the handwriting. “What the hell? Is that a come to Jesus?”

“A few of Bane’s guys were up there this morning,” Reilly says. He looks troubled. “That was all they did.”

It’s a message to John, so he climbs up onto the roof to answer it. 

_I don’t know. It would be nice to have an option to find out._

The reply comes less than an hour later, written on a wall in an abandoned brownstone. John has to steady himself on the wall when he reads it, mouth gone dry, heart thudding. _Then run,_ it says.

His writing is shaky and uneven when he responds. _Leave Gotham?_

_Yes._

_How?_

_I will make a way for you._

John struggles with himself for over an hour, ashamed by his own temptation. He doesn’t want to die. _Only me?_ he asks, to buy himself time.

_Yes._

It’s easier, seeing it laid out there in stark black and white. So to speak.

 _No,_ he writes. _Let me send someone else instead._

_There is no one else to send. Why would you stay?_

_To save Gotham._

_You cannot do that._

_I can try._

_Why? What is there to save?_

John has to stop to consider that. What he takes for granted, what doesn’t even need explanation to him, is a hard thing to articulate for someone who speaks a completely different language in every possible way but one. _Love_ , he writes eventually, frustrated by his own lack of eloquence. _Honor. Hope. Charity. Kindness. Friendship. There’s beauty here._

_’It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.’_

_I don’t think beauty is goodness. I think goodness is beauty._

_Tell me, then. What beauty have you known that is worth preserving?_

It takes a long time for John to reply. He stands in front of the question, frozen, and thinks of a thousand things, a million things—his first girlfriend; his first boyfriend; his graduation ceremony; his mother; Batman riding through a spotlight—but none of these are things that would convince a follower of Bane. He thinks about friendship: his partner Ross, and his mordant sense of humor; Gordon’s passion for his city and the people in it; Montoya and Benedict’s slowly blooming romance; Father Reilly and his quiet, flawed faith. The orphans and their endless delight. Miranda Tate and the Elephant Wife.

 _Life_ , he finally writes. _Life is beautiful._

When the answer to this eventually comes, John touches his bare fingers to it to feel the stab of pity through his skin, like the ache of a growing bone. 

_I am sorry, my friend. ‘Think of all the beauty left around you and be happy.’_

 

* * *

 

When it ends, when it all ends, it happens with horrifying speed. 

There’s no time for John to warn Gordon. There’s no time for anything. All their charms—Montoya’s, his own—shatter on an instant without warning, their backlash blinding him for a critical few seconds. When he recovers, it’s already too late. 

It’s too late for everything.

He almost writes a plea for help from his friend, but this is the zero hour, and they’ve picked their sides. He writes, _I’m sorry_ , instead on the fire escape where he was hidden, not sure what he’s apologizing for. Then he slides down it with his gun slung over his back to do the only thing he can. Get Ross out. Get them all out. They’ll die outside in open air, not trapped underground in their own graves. Gotham is agitated, alive and hungry in a way John hasn’t felt since he was just a kid, hands over his ears to keep out a mad cackle and the terrifying chime of a falling coin fifteen miles away.  

And then Ross is dead, and Batman is standing in front of him. And John was wrong, he was wrong. Batman isn’t a man. He’s two-dimensional space cut out in a man’s outline, and all there is of humanity is the pale holes of eyes in a half-mask of skin.  He isn’t Bruce Wayne at all.

“You’ve given me an army,” Batman says. 

Abruptly, terrifyingly, John feels the chains of the story snap around him, squeezing tight.

It’s pointless to panic, but he does it anyway, feeling the chain lengthen and travel with him as he runs. Gotham’s attention is well and truly caught. _He_ is well and truly caught.

“Well, fuck,” he gasps in an alley when he’s run himself breathless, hands braced on knees, head hanging and heavy. The weight of Gotham’s interest is crushing. He chokes with the pressure of it.

John looks up to find three alley cats and a rat staring at him, their eyes all reflecting the same mad joy.

 

* * *

 

Life after Bane is….

…empty.

There are a million things that need doing, and while he knows objectively that they have their own urgency, he drifts through the day empty and purposeless. The furious struggle for survival under Bane left him with little thought of future, whereas now that’s all there is. It stretches out in front of him, pointless, aimless, an unfamiliar horizon that’s empty even of the police badge that used to be his north star.

He spends days sleeping or just lying in bed, rousing only long enough to go to the bathroom and eat once a day. At some point he catches a whiff of himself and wanders into the shower, too apathetic to even take off his clothes. He has just enough energy to strip and pull on fresh sweats, still wet underneath, before he falls back into bed again.

Gordon finds him after the second week and hauls him out of bed. Gordon’s grey around the edges, a ghost of himself. John catches a few words here and there—he missed the memorial for the officers who fell during the occupation, he learns, and can’t make himself care—and comes to himself in the shower again, stripped naked and shivering.

“—Should have had Montoya check on you,” he hears.

“Ugh,” John says.

With infinite patience, Gordon scrubs him clean, dresses him in a clean change of clothes, then sits him down to shave him. By the time he’s done, John’s come back to himself enough to be bothered by the taste of his own mouth. He brushes his teeth under his own power. His stomach growls; he wanders out of the bathroom to find the police commissioner of Gotham cooking eggs and bacon in his tiny kitchenette. John’s halfway through his second plate of food before he registers the oddity of it all. He stops to stare at Gordon. 

Gordon’s finishing up his first plate. He has a milk mustache. 

“What are you doing here?” John demands. 

“We have an appointment.” Gordon wipes his face with a paper towel that he must have brought with him, together with all the groceries they’re eating now. 

For the first time, John registers that he’s been dressed in black. 

“Bruce Wayne’s funeral,” Gordon says quietly. “You won’t want to miss that.”

There’s no reproach in his voice for the other funerals John has missed. John drops his eyes under that understanding regard. “Yeah,” he says.

The funeral is some kind of turning point. Afterwards, much as he tries, there’s no returning to the muffling cocoon of sleep. He drifts in the city, helping here, lending a hand there, with no schedule or plan. From time to time he finds himself standing in front of a blank wall, chalk in hand and ready to write. He never does. There won’t be an answer, and if there is….

He isn’t sure what he’d do if there was. He drops the chalk and walks away.

Bruce Wayne’s will is a surprise.

Well. He’s not sure what to do with that, either.

He spends more weeks wandering, on new roads this time. It takes a few weeks, but eventually he admits to himself that his meanderings through Gotham have a pattern. The tight arc he’s been sketching with his meanderings has its locus point in the cave where the suit lives. Once he admits it, he has to acknowledge the equal parts resentment and longing that keeps him on that tight leash. There’s the possibility of purpose and something more in the cave that Bruce Wayne left him. It isn’t that he’s scared—he’s not scared—but to step into the Batman’s shoes means giving himself up to something that would swallow him whole. To Gotham, entirely and forever. It took a nuclear bomb to free Bruce Wayne. Gordon will eventually be sucked dry. What the city will do to John is anyone’s guess.

(Maybe he is a little scared.)

John wasn’t meant to be Batman. The suit has its own shadows. They roll around its feet when it’s in the display case like legless, spineless, eyeless kittens. The case door has biometric locks. John checks, and finds they’re on the inside as well as the outside—just in case the suit wants to go wandering while it’s alone, stalk off to roam Gotham without a body inside? He wouldn’t put that past it.

He dreams about it for a solid week, night after night in which he’s chased by the suit for the entertainment of Gotham, waking up with the shamed certainty that he’s being a coward. Gotham’s interest in him hasn’t faded since that night, but he’s gotten used to it. He looks up in the middle of street cleaning (volunteer work) or construction (paid labor) and finds pigeons staring at him with disconcerting fanaticism; sits on the toilet and discovers a line of cockroaches balanced on his towel rack, antennae all twitching and pointed at him.

He volunteers for more indoor activities; eats bananas and regrets it. One night, insomniac and lonely, he scrawls, _Are you alive?_ on a wall. Days pass. His words disappear behind gang signs and obscene claims of other people’s virility. 

“You look—“ Montoya says when she sees him again at the two-one. It’s the first time they’ve run into each other since the last of the funerals. She looks the way he feels, victory sucking the life out of her the way occupation never had. 

He holds up his hand and flaps it at her. She reaches with hers and grabs it, turning his hand over to study the veins under his skin. 

“Like crap,” he supplies, remembering a conversation long ago. He still can’t think about Miranda Tate without a pang, either of anger or regret.

“Different,” she says, and, “Goddammit,” she says, and drags his arm towards her so that his wrist sticks out, bony, from the frayed sleeve of his shirt. “ _Madre de_ —”

She’s looking down past his arm so he does too, and sees the fuzzy shadow of himself cast on the linoleum. Her shadow is an equally blurry puddle just beyond it.

“What?” he asks.

“— _Dios_ ,” she finishes with the fervor of a curse, and he sees it then, the gap where the shadow of his arm should be but isn’t, a blankness on the floor where light has passed through bare flesh. “What have you been doing?” she demands.

He rolls up his sleeve. His shadow contracts further around his feet. Not his shadow, he realizes, but his clothes’ shadow. Like Peter Pan’s, his has fled. “It’s because I got everyone out of the tunnels,” he says, meeting her gaze squarely in the lie. 

There’s no mistaking her pity or her disbelief. “Ah, Blake,” she says. “You poor bastard.”

There’s really no question of searching for his shadow. John looks in exactly one place, and finds it sitting where he expects. Under the floodlights of the cave it’s stretched out to gigantic lengths, smugly attached to the foot of the suit.

“Asshole,” he tells it. It shrugs at him. Even without facial features he can read the cast-off of body language; there’s no apology, just a nonchalant, _whatchya gonna do?_ that’s both unanswerable and infuriating. The shadow kittens gambol around him while he figures out the suit, takes it apart, then puts it together again in a new configuration around himself. A configuration that fits, so that it sits against his skin like something familiar and forgotten. He knows instinctively what to tighten and where: how to bypass the electricity that protects the cowl; how to settle the leads that monitor his blood pressure, his O sat, his pulse, his blood pressure.

When he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees two-dimensional space cut out in a man’s outline, and all there is of humanity is the pale holes of eyes in a half-mask of skin. His shadow slithers smoothly back into place as though it never left him to begin with— and that’s the last thing he knows until he finds himself on the MCU roof, looking Jim Gordon in the face. The commissioner’s face is drawn, haggard and grieved like he hasn’t been since the occupation. It feels like the first clear thing John has seen since Batman died.

“Fuck,” Gordon says. It’s the first time John has ever heard him swear. “Not you too, son.”

He lets Gordon tend injuries he doesn’t remember getting: a hole in his back where something sharp made it through the armor, a weakness in his ankle that suggests a sprain. He doesn’t say a word to Gordon, and Gordon doesn’t say anything else beyond that first, unthinking expletive. When he turns to go, the armor reattached under the commissioner’s careful hands, that’s when Gordon stops him. “Son.”

John pauses, his back turned to him. Through the suit, he remembers Bruce doing the same to Gordon, a show of trust he only gave to two other men. 

“You don’t have to do this,” Gordon says.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, John can feel Gotham. Not listening, exactly, but waiting; the choice is his to make, apparently, for all the pressure she put on him before. He waits, to hear what arguments Gordon will make, surprised that he’d make any at all.

“It’s a lonely business,” Gordon says, sounding tired. “I don’t want you ending up like—“ he hesitates, Bruce’s name unspoken but heavy in the silence.

John’s used to loneliness. He turns his head. “I have you,” he says in his own voice. 

Gordon’s expression shifts, old worry lifting to make way for shock, then pleasure.

It warms John all the way back to the cave. 

 

* * *

 

But the thing is, Gordon isn’t wrong.

 

* * *

 

He develops a routine. He sleeps during most of the day, hits clubs and picks up girls and the occasional guy in the evenings, plays vigilante at night. Money starts appearing in his bank account from a medium-sized PI firm on the outskirts of Gotham, enough to pay for a modest lifestyle, with enough left over for the occasional emergency urgent care visit. A little digging uncovers that the company is a subcontractor for Wayne Industries, which is only a surprise in that it’s so easy to trace. Then again, he supposes, making it hard would suggest there was something to hide. 

He is, he discovers, a salaried employee of Tower Security. He even has a 401k. They never ask him to show up to work.

His friends—what friends he had left—fall away. They have jobs. Lives. And they are almost all of them observant enough to wonder at John’s habit of getting injured. Bruce, John remembers, had a reputation for enjoying extreme sports. Post-occupation, some of his ex-colleagues have started taking stupid risks on and off the job. PTSD. The shrinks the feds sent in are working overtime. He gets a letter from FEMA, inviting him in for therapy on the government’s dime. 

He does the socially responsible thing and recycles it.

The feeling of disconnect grows. The people he talks to and fucks feel like ghosts, half-real. He’s surprised when he turns around and finds them still there. It’s only at night that he feels alive, chasing the paper trail of some complicated crime, falling out of the rafters to disrupt some mafia meet. He needs….

He needs a friend.

The next time he finds himself standing in front of a wall, he makes himself spray paint onto brick. It’s been seven months since the bomb; four months since Batman reappeared on Gotham’s streets, a modern-day Lazarus. 

 _‘We do not merely destroy our enemies—‘_ he writes, then stops himself. The incompleteness of the quote is jarring, a dissonance that nags at him like a unwelcome earworm. Well then. Maybe. He leaves it there, feeling the unresolved cadence of it pulling at him even three blocks away. The building grumbles in the back of his mind, dissatisfied. If his— if _he_ lives, if he’s still in Gotham and not rotting away in a jail or a grave, he might hear that call.

 

* * *

 

It starts like this.

“The city is doing better,” Gordon says, looking out over Gotham’s night.

“Maybe,” John says as Batman, standing beside him on the rooftop.

Gordon huffs a breath. “The National Reserve is moving out,” he says. “We’ll be on our own come next week.”

“Progress.”

“Something like that.” Gordon rocks back on his heels. “You’ve done good work.”

John considers this. “We’ve done good work.”

Silence. Then a sigh. “She’ll never be the same,” Gordon says. He sounds gently nostalgic, but not sad.

John turns his head to look at him. Feels Gotham sleepy and sated in the back of his mind. “Is that a bad thing?” he asks. He has new scars. New nightmares. New skills. A million regrets. What Gordon has, he can only guess at.

Gordon doesn’t answer the question; only shrugs, and looks quizzical. “There’s a gang of kids out there chalking bat signs all over the city. Don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

“Vandalism is bad,” John says gravely.

Gordon’s mouth tilts. “Thought you might be interested,” he says, passing John the file folder he’s been holding.

Inside, there are grainy pictures, low-pixel shots from a phone magnified and printed out. He recognizes the top one as the shot Montoya showed him long ago in the canteen. Under them are more, other conversations he held through the medium of a wall. Not all of them, but enough to show the progression of a friendship.

Looking at them brings back sense memory: the cold, the chalk crumbling under his fingers, the smell of stale piss, the jittery paranoia that kept him looking over his shoulder. And then, later, the curious sense of safety, of being protected.

He stops with a picture in a hand, casting his mind back. Was there safety? He realizes it with a pang. After that encounter with Bane’s men and the kid, he never looked over his shoulder while writing his replies again. Until that last, horrible night, when he set his brothers free—when men of Gotham put guns to his head—and Batman saved his life. 

“It’s not something we’re investigating,” Gordon tells the horizon, not looking at John. “Just some strange conversations that were happening while Bane was in control of the city.”

“Do you know who they were?” John asks, looking down at his own writing:  _I miss eggs._ Months too late, he realizes the connection between his own idle thought and a day in the canteen, and marvels at his own stupidity.

Gordon says mildly again, “It’s not something we’re investigating.”

John tucks the pictures away in his suit, and hands the empty folder back to Gordon. He doesn’t say thank you. They never do.

He’s driving through the streets of Gotham in the tumbler when he hears it; a scrape like stone running across mortar, the quiet rattle of gravel falling to pavement. Without thinking he yanks the steering wheel to the right, reorienting himself towards that distant wall. Someone is writing on it. He can see the words forming behind every blink, white against the backs of his eyelids. Even in haste, he has enough foresight not to frighten off the writer by driving into the alley. He parks a block away and launches himself up to the rooftops, terrifying a young couple out on a midnight stroll. From there, it’s a quick sprint to the other side of the block. 

He stops at the edge of the last building and peers over. At the bottom of it, a hooded figure stands with his arm raised, chalk showing ridiculously dainty between his fingertips.

There’s no one else around. John drops silently to the sidewalk and stands, his heart hammering with relief. Joy. Triumph. A presentiment of grief.

_‘We do not merely destroy our enemies—‘_

The new handwriting distinctive, slanted strangely, like the writer is accustomed to the shape of a different alphabet. The writer’s hand moves awkwardly, his elbow pressed in against his side as though protecting a healing injury. When he’s done, he lets his arm drop heavily to his side and turns his head to look at John. 

John’s lungs twist. He shivers once, his body realigning itself like iron filings towards a new magnetic north. Shadows grow thicker at his feet, then rush towards the wall to blanket bricks instead; the new letters glow against the black. 

 _‘—we change them.’_  

A feather flutters into them and doesn’t touch ground.

“You,” John says. His hands open and close, baffled, at his sides.

Pale eyes crinkle over the mask. 

Bane says:

“ _Me_.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Quotation citations, for those of you who are interested:
> 
>   * _‘Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.’ - Anne Lamott_
>   *  _‘Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.’ - Aristotle_
>  _
>   * ‘Youth has no age.’ - Pablo Picasso 
>   * ‘To believe in youth is to look backwards.’ - Dorothy L. Sayers 
>   * ‘Youth should be respected. How will you know its future will not equal your present?’ - Confucius 
>   * ‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.’ - Nelson Mandela 
>   * ‘The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.’ - Samuel Johnson (apocrypha?) 
>   * ‘Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.' - Thomas Fuller 
>   * ‘Conscience is but a word that cowards use.’ - Shakespeare 
>   * ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.’ - Emiliano Zapata 
>   * ‘In the end they have laid their freedom at our feet and said to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.’ - Dostoyevsky 
>   * ‘An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.’ - Albert Einstein 
>   * ‘In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.’ - Napoleon 
>   * ‘The most terrible poverty is loneliness.’ - Mother Teresa 
>   * ‘We live as we dream — alone.’ - Joseph Conrad 
>   * ‘Everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.’ - Bob Marley 
>   * ‘True friends stab you in the front.’ - Oscar Wilde 
>   * ‘The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.’ - Tacitus 
>   * ‘The desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.’ - Tacitus 
>   * ‘Ignorance is strength.’ - George Orwell (1984) 
>   * ‘Unhappy is a land in need of heroes.' - Bertolt Brecht 
>   * ‘When a man is in despair, it means he still believes in something.’ - Dimitri Shostakovich 
>   * ‘He who stands for nothing will fall for anything.’ - Alexander Hamilton 
>   * ‘The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.’ - Emerson 
>   * ‘Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’ - Arthur Miller 
>   * ‘There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.’ - Henry David Thoreau 
>   * ‘It is human nature to hate the man you have hurt.’ - Tacitus 
>   * ‘If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.' - Mother Teresa 
>   * ‘The condition of man … is a condition of war against everyone.’ - Thomas Hobbes 
>   * ‘No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.’ - Shakespeare 
>   * ‘Sin, death, and hell have set their marks upon him, And all their ministers attend on him.’ - Shakespeare 
>   * ‘The ache for home lives with all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.’ - Maya Angelou 
>   * ‘Marvelous are the innocent.’ - Virginia Woolf 
>   * ’It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.’ - Leo Tolstoy 
>   * ‘Think of all the beauty left around you and be happy.’ - Anne Frank 
>   * ‘We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.’ - George Orwell (1984) 
> _ 



End file.
